The Board of Regents approved the University of Georgia’s request to raze the 36,000-square-foot dining hall just down the Baxter Street Hill from three high-rise dormitories.

Workers won’t take a wrecking ball to Bolton right away, though. Students will continue to scarf up thousands of meals a day in the 50-year-old building at least through spring semester.

Earlier this year, construction crews started work on a bigger replacement for Bolton. The new $30 million dining hall at the intersection of Baxter and Lumpkin streets started rising out of the ground this year. Construction is scheduled to conclude next summer, in time to begin serving about 7,000 meals each day beginning with the 2014 fall semester.

Students eat about 5,000 meals a day at Bolton now.

At 55,000 square feet, the new building will be about 20,000 square feet larger than Bolton.

It will also seat more diners at a time, with about 950 seats, compared to Bolton’s 700.

A long-range UGA plan calls for more residence halls in the area where Bolton Hall sits, but administrators have no immediate plans to build on the site, said Tom Jackson, UGA’s vice president for public affairs.

For now, some of the land under Bolton will be converted to green space and some into parking spaces, according to documents UGA planners submitted to the state Board of Regents.

As work continues on Bolton Hall’s replacement, UGA has also gotten a green light on another big-dollar construction project.

Meeting last week in Atlanta, the Board of Regents tapped Whiting Turner Contracting Company to manage construction of a planned $48 million Science Learning Center.

Whiting was the winner among 18 construction firms vying to get the Science Learning Center contract.

The new science building will have classrooms and laboratories for basic science classes, but will also serve as a south campus gathering place for students.

The 123,000-square-foot building will be built on UGA land near UGA’s Stegeman Coliseum and the UGA Pharmacy Building.

The Science Learning Center is also a kind of linchpin for UGA’s long-term plan to build research capacity.

Once student labs are moved to the Science Learning Center, space now used for teaching labs can be converted into faculty research labs, according to UGA President Jere Morehead.